My flip reaction is that my heart bleeds for him. He's very attached to maintaining a site where white supremacists and those who disagree with them can civilly discuss their issues, but he gets sad when other people publicly say that that they think it's a gross thing to be doing, because then people get mad at him? This does not seem like a problem I'm going to worry about much.
"Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas."
My understanding (from reddit), was that it got shut down because he was worried about people in the real world questioning his white racist fun thread.
That's because it turns out that racism is the real racism.
Yeah, free speech is a complete bummer when it means that other people can talk back.
As I said, I don't really know the backstory, nor have I read the (apparently quite voluminous) threads in question. However, a couple of items from his description might make a difference (1) the discussion in question was on reddit, not his blog. (2) it was confined to a distinct, clearly marked thread (3) it was moderated -- not by him, but by several volunteers. (4) he believed the thread served a purpose and had value for the readers of his blog.
Based on that, I can understand why he would wrestle with the question of whether it was possible to create enough distance such that the thread could exist without him being held responsible for everything that was said (and deciding, unhappily, that no it wasn't).
And of course, wanting to civilly debate with racists doesn't make you a racist, necessarily. But if the manner in which you want to broker civil debate with racists makes people think you're mostly fine with them? That seems like a problem that you brought on yourself.
So, I'm slightly curious, does anybody have a good link describing what was noxious about the thread in question?
I feel like 7 might be begging the question, but don't have enough context to judge.
(4) he believed the thread served a purpose and had value for the readers of his blog.
meet whether it was possible to create enough distance such that the thread could exist without him being held responsible for everything that was said
That is, if he thought the thread served a purpose and had value, it is not unjust for people to hold him responsible for facilitating the expression of the things said on it -- the combination of "This thread was useful and important" and "It's slanderous to associate me with the things said in this thread" is not a combination of statements that looks good together.
10: yes, I was aware of the tension when I wrote 6. What I'm not sure about is whether that tension is (or should be) unresolvable or if there should be some way to thread that needle.
I never visited the Culture Wars thread, but I have read SSC occasionally since I discovered it a few years ago. I found the SSC site itself was mostly conspicuous for the density of Elon Musk worshiping "all the world's problems will be solved if everyone learns to code and by the way taxation is theft" libertarians.
My impression is that Scott Alexander was genuine about wanting to create some sort of Platonic ideal "Everyone can discuss things civilly, even extreme weirdos" space, and was somewhat willfully naive about the possibility that it wouldn't eventually take on the character of a clubhouse for extreme weirdos.
8: I'm primed for this because I've been reading discussion on MetaFilter: Here. The MeFi comments link to a reddit that was set up to make fun of the thread: r/sneerclub , and there are some links to the bad bits of the thread. What tipped me over was links to someone writing calmly and politely why his politics were reasonably driven by the "14 words" (white supremacist slogan).
Continuing 11 -- I understood his argument to be, on some level, "if you, the reader, believe that it should, in theory, be possible to manage that tension but, in practice there's no way to actually do so, that may be a problem. "
I am somewhat sympathetic to that, but it would depend on what sort of effort was being made.
should be some way to thread that needle.
I have thoughts about this, because I used to enjoy arguing with Shearer (polite, coherent, definitely committed to racism of the 'human biodiversity' type, although I don't remember him using that term) here, and was never quite sure about whether I was doing a good or a bad thing. (And ultimately he was sort of soft-banned, in part because some people convinced me that arguing with Shearer was not a good thing to be doing.) But I think the absolute minimum, if you're facilitating a space for people to express horrible ideas, is making your own opinion of those ideas unequivocally, absolutely, and specifically clear, and if you don't express your strong disagreement with them, people are justified in thinking you're okay with them.
Alexander seems to be taking the position "Well, obviously I don't agree with everything on the thread, I'm a nice person!" as sufficient to establish that he's not responsible for the really bad stuff. But if he doesn't make his line clear between what he thinks is valuable and what he thinks is horrifying but necessary to keep the conversation going, he can't complain about how people react.
Like, this:
I freely admit there were people who were against homosexuality in the thread (according to my survey, 13%), people who opposed using trans people's preferred pronouns (according to my survey, 9%), people who identified as alt-right (7%), and a single person who identified as a neo-Nazi (who as far as I know never posted about it). Less outrageous ideas were proportionally more popular: people who were mostly feminists but thought there were differences between male and female brains, people who supported the fight against racial discrimination but thought could be genetic differences between races. All these people definitely existed, some of them in droves. All of them had the right to speak; sometimes I sympathized with some of their points.
Is super coy about what points he sympathized with. If you think people who think there "could be genetic differences between races" are an important part of your valuable discussion, and sometimes you sympathize with some of their points? It's on you to make it clear whether the bits you sympathize with are the racist bits.
15 It reminds me of that line (that I'm getting wrong here) about what you call a bar where a few Nazis hang out: a Nazi bar, of course.
All this discussion is missing the important context that SSC is bad, and posts there are regularly 5 to 10 times longer than they need to be.
19 For some reason I kept confusing it with that Trogdor the Burninator site and wondering where all the goddam cartoons and flash games were.
I woke up this morning and realized I had discovered the solution to all of America's racial woes. Our genius African-American musicians should all hire our Trump-supporting racist white men as their chauffeurs.
A soft-focus picture about the heartwarming story of the team of white men who bear Cardi B around town on a palanquin like Grace Jones in Boomerang.
Am I remembering correctly that there was a period during the early glory period of the political blogosphere, that trying to moderate your comment section was generally disparaged?
For three years, if you wanted to read about... just how #MeToo has led to sex parties with consent enforcers dressed as unicorns, the r/SSC culture war thread was the place to be.
Want to click that link, but nope, not going to do it at work.
Sorry to be all prurient in such a serious, sad topic. Don't have much to say about the main topic except that for years now I've had a myopic, un-reflective attitude towards politics and the culture war (lowercase, since I haven't followed that thread under discussion in the link) and frankly this makes me feel better about it. FWIW I wrote that before reading the link in 13, which I'm still working my way through and seems very relevant.
23: I think that back in the day a lot of people were naive in the same way that Scott Alexander was being about the possibility of maintaining a completely open* discussion forum.
But that was 15 years ago and the evidence that comments sections inevitably either become moderated or become cesspools have been overwhelming since then.
*From the SSC post I gather that there was some form of moderation, but it sounds like it was mostly for tone rather than content.
But I think the absolute minimum, if you're facilitating a space for people to express horrible ideas, is making your own opinion of those ideas unequivocally, absolutely, and specifically clear, and if you don't express your strong disagreement with them, people are justified in thinking you're okay with them.
Alexander seems to be taking the position "Well, obviously I don't agree with everything on the thread, I'm a nice person!" as sufficient to establish that he's not responsible for the really bad stuff. But if he doesn't make his line clear between what he thinks is valuable and what he thinks is horrifying but necessary to keep the conversation going, he can't complain about how people react.
. . .
Is super coy about what points he sympathized with. If you think people who think there "could be genetic differences between races" are an important part of your valuable discussion, and sometimes you sympathize with some of their points? It's on you to make it clear whether the bits you sympathize with are the racist bits.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I think that's all broadly correct. On the other hand, I don't know how much practical advice that gives to somebody trying to negotiate the dilemma.
[Side note: part of what makes me sympathetic to the idea that Scott Alexander was at least trying to negotiate the dilemma is that the story ends with him having a nervous breakdown. In general, I give more rope to people who are doing something that seems to me to be a bad idea, but are doing so in a way which clearly has a cost to them (compared to somebody just doing it for the LOLs). That is hardly decisive. People often do things which are self-destructive and harmful to others and which are just bad ideas. But, if somebody's willing to hurt themselves to do something it makes it more convincing that they have some reason for making that choice.]
So, my concerns would be:
1) Does that standard give the trolls too much power to set the agenda? If people have an affirmative obligation to distance themselves from offensive things being said (in a forum two steps removed from their personal statements), that means that they have to respond to everything or be willing to take responsibility for hit.
2) Does that apply equally to the "Kill All Men" or "I hate White People" statements? I don't think Sarah Jeong, for example, meant those sentiments seriously, but it seems possible that she was associated with a forum in which people said things in that vein at least semi-seriously.
3) I do think level of engagement matters. There's a significant difference between you arguing with Shearer directly, vs putting up an open thread and saying, "Shearer is allowed to comment in this thread, even if he's normally banned."
I'll look at the MeFi link you posted. I do think there's a limit to the value of discussing hypothetical situations. I just feel like I can believe both (a) that Scott Alexander made poor choices about how to handle the "culture wars" threads and (b) that the range of what would not be a "poor choice" is extreme small given his desires for an open forum.
23: My sense wasn't so much that moderation at all was disparaged, but moderation in a way that seemed to unfairly shut down disagreement was. And of course, the devil is in the details about what's unfair: I don't think it's unfair to shut down, e.g., avowed white supremacists. But we certainly tolerated people here arguing for positions that I think of as war crimes (that is, people saying that the invasion of Iraq was permissible rather than being a prohibited war of aggression.) Tolerated in the loose sense of 'didn't ban' -- I certainly berated people.
Any public forum needs to make decisions about what is beyond the pale. When people gripe about the treatment on college campuses of Charles Murray or Milo Yiannopoulos, they often fail to reckon with the issues that are actually being debated.
The Murray supporters want to frame the debate in terms of free speech, but that's not what the argument is about. Pretty much everyone agrees that certain views must be censored in certain forums. The question is: Is Murray beyond the pale on a college campus or a respectable political journal like the New Republic? To me, the answer is obvious: This asshole shouldn't be permitted an audience in these forums.
If you want a forum where people can openly assert the genetic inferiority of minorities, then you are placing a low ceiling on minority participation. If you want a forum that promotes bullshit science, you are discriminating against science. You can't get around that.
If people have an affirmative obligation to distance themselves from offensive things being said (in a forum two steps removed from their personal statements), that means that they have to respond to everything or be willing to take responsibility for hit.
If it's in a forum that's associated with your, I don't know how to put this, 'brand', yeah, I think that's right. Not necessarily respond to everything, but respond to every broad category of thing enough to make your position on it clear. That's burdensome if you want to run an open forum that's personally associated with you and that you drive traffic to, that includes horrible, evil people, but no one's making you do that. (That is, I'd be sympathetic if Alexander's position was "Why am I getting shit for what gets said on the CW thread, I don't run it and I take no responsibility at all for what goes on there." But it's on a reddit devoted to his blog, he organized the moderators, it's not unreasonable to call him responsible for it.)
Another way to say it is that the outcome is that all the same people get to talk just as much as they want to on a different reddit. Alexander haz a sad because he didn't like being responsible for what was said in a space he was running/moderating, and if he doesn't want to be responsible, he can't be associated with it in the same way he was. That's the price of running/moderating a forum, isn't it?
I've only ever been the moderated.
Another way to say it is that the outcome is that all the same people get to talk just as much as they want to on a different reddit. Alexander haz a sad because he didn't like being responsible for what was said in a space he was running/moderating, and if he doesn't want to be responsible, he can't be associated with it in the same way he was. That's the price of running/moderating a forum, isn't it?
FWIW, reading the MeFi thread is convincing that I don't want to put too much energy into defending SSC specifically (this for example argues believably that there's a real problem with the community as a whole, not just a handful of cranks).
That said, it's perfectly understandable for somebody to feel sad at watching an online forum they care about fall apart, and deciding that it needs to be kicked out and find a new home (something that happens often enough online to hardly be a surprise). I recognize, however, that's not how Scott describes his feelings; he presents himself as sad that he's being forced to do something he doesn't want to do, not as sad that the forum has gone in a very bad direction. What I don't know reading the post is whether that means that Scott really doesn't see anything wrong with the Culture Wars threads, or if he's angry as well as sad and not ready to publicly admit to being wrong (or more likely, some combination of the two).
Maybe I'm being uncharitable but he's sad he couldn't maintain a 'community' that included white supremacists and homophobes and that ilk without it descending into a haven for white supremacy, homophobia, and such; at best he's being extremely naive and I can't say I have much sympathy.
The contrast between:
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don't want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas.
and
Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to this. I think you're bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual, I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I'm mostly talking to the sort of people who delight in others' distress and so this won't register. But I'm also a little upset at some of my (otherwise generally excellent) friends in the rationalist community who were quick to jump on the "Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross people and I wish they couldn't speak" bandwagon (to be clear, I don't mean the friends who offered me good advice about separating from the CW thread for the sake of my own well-being, I mean people who actively contributed to worsening the whole community's reputation based on a few bad actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but I think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions more carefully.
is quite striking and to my mind makes the author look pretty bad. "All opinions allowed even if it is hateful, except for the opinion that free speech should not be absolute or hate towards people like me" is not a good look.
This is pure uncharitable bitchiness, also. But the linked post is explicitly completely indefinite about who did or said what to Alexander specifically that made him unhappy. My Bayesian priors about the kind of person I've met who both thinks of themselves as a decent person who's sympathetic about real social problems and also thinks that's it's very important to listen to people who are just raising concerns about whether people of color are inferior and women are best suited to domestic work and gays may be an abomination in the sight of the Lord? In my experience people like that tend to be astonishingly fragile about criticism.
I could be wrong about Alexander, I don't know him. Maybe if I knew everything I'd agree that he'd been badly treated. But my guess is that he didn't actually take all that much abuse.
He deals with this a paradox a little bit in his sixth point, enough to identify himself as behaving badly, but not enough to empathize with other people doing the same thing.
35: The doxxing and the trying to get him fired sound genuinely pretty terrible. My impression from Sc/ott Aaron/son's vaguely similar situation, and he's someone I do know and think is genuinely sympathetic (especially before his bad online crowd experience), was that the worst harassment really was pretty bad. However, the jump from the worst harassment to everyone sharing those views is problematic, and especially problematic from someone who thinks having Nazis around is ok as long as they're calm moderate Nazis. (And by really bad, I mean worse than anything I've ever had to put up with and bad enough that it would really bother me, but not as bad as say what a typical woman writing about video games has to deal with.)
Notable here is that he didn't kill a thread so much as use that thread to launch a new, terrible subreddit.
This is pure uncharitable bitchiness, also. . . . I could be wrong about Alexander, I don't know him. Maybe if I knew everything I'd agree that he'd been badly treated. But my guess is that he didn't actually take all that much abuse.
Let me try one more time to think through what I found interesting about the linked post. I don't particularly care about SSC. I've read a handful of posts, some of the interesting, some of them not, and overall my feeling is that I'm glad to read some of his stuff but more often in an, "this is interesting to argue with; and the length of the post gives me more time to think about where I would take this in a different direction" rather than "this represents my belief."
I'd hope that Scott Alexander isn't a terrible person both because that's my general hope about anybody and because I can recognize the impulse that his writing speaks to and I'd like it if that audience had non-terrible people writing for it (and, for what it's worth, I'd like to imagine that the audience that he's writing for isn't _that_ different from the audience for a bunch of the science fiction that I read as an adolescent -- some of which was terrible and some of which wasn't).
I also think it's a fair challenge to say, "if you think Scott deserved to suffer (in whatever ways, large or small that he has) for the problems that arose in the SSC community, it's worth having a clear answer for somebody who says, 'I'd like to do something adjacent to what Scott Alexander was doing, and I'd rather not suffer, what should I do differently?" (I appreciate LB giving an answer in 15/16/29).
Obviously anybody can have their own opinions without needing to go through the work of saying, "here's what you could have done differently" but I do think that's an important question.
38: Doxxing is not one thing, though. Like, back when I was posting a lot and blogs were more of a thing, if anyone had wanted to bother to post my real name? I would have been a little cranky, but I would also have thought that I certainly hadn't worked particularly hard at being secure: there were a bunch of times when people did bring up how easy I was to identify, in a fashion that would have let anyone else reading follow the same line of reasoning. If all he means is "posting his real name", that doesn't seem like a giant deal to me in the absence of any actual bad outcome. Trying to get him fired does seem like a big deal, admittedly, but it sounds like one call, one time, from what he said.
And the next paragraph where he's waffling about how not all of it is attributable to the CW thread? That kind of made my eyes roll even more.
He deals with this a paradox a little bit in his sixth point, enough to identify himself as behaving badly, but not enough to empathize with other people doing the same thing.
Just to quote his sixth point
Sixth, I want to apologize to anybody who's had to deal with me the past - oh, let's say several years. One of the really bad parts of this debacle has been that it's made me a much worse person. When I started writing this blog, I think I was a pretty nice person who was willing to listen to and try to hammer out my differences with anyone. As a result of some of what I've described, I think I've become afraid, bitter, paranoid, and quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with me (along a dimension that too closely resembles some of the really bad people I've had to deal with) is a bad actor who needs to be discredited and destroyed. I don't know how to fix this. I can only apologize for it, admit you're not imagining it, and ask people to do as I say (especially as I said a few years ago when I was a better person) and not as I do. I do think this is a great learning experience in terms of psychology and will write a post on it eventually; I just wish I didn't have to learn it from the inside.
My question would be whether that's a starting point for introspection or an ending point. If it's a starting point, that's pretty good. He clearly acknowledges that he's been doing the wrong thing. If it's the ending point then it suffers from not specifying exactly what he did that was wrong or how he should have done it better. But I think that's more than just a hand-wave.
41:
'I'd like to do something adjacent to what Scott Alexander was doing, and I'd rather not suffer, what should I do differently?"
You do it anonymously.
Like I said, if you're facilitating the expression of beliefs so repugnant that it would damage you to be associated with them, you make it very clear what your own beliefs are. Again, I liked having Shearer around to argue with, and I vaguely wish him well wherever he is (mostly, wishing him well involves hoping that he's become a better person somehow). And I ultimately felt that having him make racist arguments here was a problem. But over the years I was engaging with him in a moderately friendly way here, no one ever, to my knowledge, had the impression that I agreed with him about any of the evil stuff he said, because I had clearly expressed that I didn't.
43: If it's a starting point I'll agree it's promising, but I'm a bit skeptical that it's a starting point given the rest of the post. But the point I wanted to emphasize here is that nowhere in his sixth does he seem to realize the similarities between his reaction to bad behavior coming from a certain political direction, and other people's similar reaction to say calm homophobes. He can't separate out his feelings about his calm critics from the scary ones, but he expects everyone else to maintain a strict emotional barrier between someone arguing homophobia is wrong and people who hurt and kill gay people. And he can't even do this when the bad behavior is one scary phone call and harshly expressed criticism, and he expects other people to do it when their lives are on the line. I'd rather he conclude that his reaction was human and reasonable and hence his old views should be rethought a bit, rather than concluding that his views have always been right and he just failed to live up to those ideals.
47: Nicely put, yes -- that's a much more coherent description of the behavior I was talking about when I called that kind of person fragile.
It would be valuable to have some received wisdom published about how to conduct yourself Extremely Online when things start to go a bit sideways. Like, this is how you apologize for saying something offensive, even though you had good intentions. This is how you communicate the difference between ideas and statements you declare unwelcome in a space you host, those you'll tolerate but disagree with, and those you endorse. Like a Restatement, but for Internet.
Again, I liked having Shearer around to argue with, and I vaguely wish him well wherever he is (mostly, wishing him well involves hoping that he's become a better person somehow
I checked on him and he does not appear to have changed in any way at all.
Like, there are a lot of "rationalist"/low EQ/spectrum-y people out there who could use things spelled out.
I'm curious about if Scott Alexander was ever doxxed or otherwise seriously harassed from the left/liberal/SJW/whatever side of the spectrum. According to this, found in the Metafilter thread, he actually was doxxed by an incel. This is pretty much the opposite of the impression I had after reading the link in the OP and the comments up to that point.
If he genuinely got harassed equally badly by both sides and is now taking a "a pox on both their houses" attitude, he may be wrong about important stuff but I can't help feeling a little sympathy for him. If on the other hand he only or mainly got seriously harassed by the right-wing nuts, Christ, what bullshit. I couldn't determine whether he's sincerely deluded or a disingenuous troll on par with James O'Keefe and couldn't be bothered to figure it out. (Of course, it's almost impossible to be sure about this; "seriously harassed" is hard to be objective about.)
39, 40:
Notable here is that he didn't kill a thread so much as use that thread to launch a new, terrible subreddit.
Is there any other kind?
Sure. There are lots of subreddits that aren't new, at least in Internet years. Also, every subreddit is terrible in its own special way. Some kinds of terrible may suit your taste better than others.
I agree, 47 is well put, and I appreciate you elaborating on your point.
Prolix libertarians on the spectrum are actually very hard to argue with since they always can point to some part of the argument that you are missing or you end up trying to express some common sense bit of moral reasoning that is surprisingly hard to put in a clear sentence. Plus, they are usually very smart. Those guys don't actually have any political power so you don't really need to engage any of their arguments though. (I mean probably somebody does but not me)
45: Ah. I'm not actually going to read any of the linked stuff. I count on Unfogged to curate reddit (and the rest of the Internet) for me.
If we're going to assume a world where safe anonymity is impossible (a reasonable assumption for many purposes), then the answer is: Don't do stuff like this at all.
Nobody has used the word "entitled" in this thread yet, but I take that to be the heart of Alexander's offense. He felt like he could organize a large-scale forum with a mission that included tolerance for white supremacists and whatnot. That's the sort of bad idea that comes from not being vulnerable to the harm created by certain kinds of free speech.
I won't cast stones. On a smaller scale, I've been guilty of the same, but I've been discreet about it -- limiting my bad behavior to Unfogged comments and similar. And the resulting blowback has been proportional -- sharp words or mockery in response. That's the price of doing business in Internet forums, and one that I pay cheerfully.
Alexander maybe got dumped on excessively relative to his actual offense, but he was behaving badly and attempting to do so on a largish scale. If I'm going to worry about people getting shit on for stuff they do on the Internet, I'm going to worry about Ani/ta Sark/eesian or Zo/ë Qu/inn or whoever -- people who aren't seeking an audience in order to express gross entitlement.
I'd rather ban the Shearers (who I think was a pos) and have more Lords Castock* around.
*There's a commenter whose viewpoints I've missed and who added a lot of value.
Well, sure, anyone with any sense would make that tradeoff if it were on offer.
But isn't it precisely the tradeoff on offer? The price of tolerating your Shearers is driving off your Lords Castock.
Not specifically? Lord Castock was around for years while Shearer was around, was around some after Shearer wasn't, and has dropped in at long intervals not all that long ago. I'm pretty sure that he's drifted off because this is a less active/interesting place than it was rather than because of anything about Shearer.
If you mean that not Castock specifically, but black commenters generally would have been more likely to participate if Shearer hadn't been around, that's a real possibility and was part of the reason I ultimately thought not having him around was an improvement. But it's hard to tell how much of an effect that would have had.
52.1 is remarkable. His post certainly implies that he was doxxed by SJW types. That's some serious bad faith.
I think people drift away because there aren't as many horrible puns as before.
It is possible that he was also doxxed by people on the left? He sounds as if he was in my category of pretty easy to dox, so it could have happened multiple times.
But generally, yeah, the waffliness of how he describes what happened to him let him give the impression that only leftists were ever mean to him, without his clearly committing to anything.
59 I'm vaguely remembering a few conversations on here where LC pretty much said he felt unwelcome by the toleration of Shearer's presence here.
I think you're remembering those more vaguely than you think you are. Castock obviously thought Shearer was a racist ass, as any sensible person would, but the timing doesn't make sense for him to have left over Shearer.
Shearer has been gone a long time. I can barely remember him. I remember LC clearly.
But the linked post is explicitly completely indefinite about who did or said what to Alexander specifically that made him unhappy.
I believe he explicitly mentions someone calling the hospital/practice site where he works pretending to be a patient and trying to get him fired. That's a step beyond "people said mean things about me on twitter".
It's still pretty indefinite about the 'who'. That is, if you run a forum where left-wing and right-wing people fight with each other, if you're going to talk about how the left-wing people exclusively made you miserable, I'd like to see a statement that they're the ones who did the bad stuff. See the discussion of doxxing in 52, 51, 63.
IIRC, Shearer accommodation, already too high, I thought, went over the line when he started submitting front page guest posts, making him look like much more than a just barely tolerated commenter, and LC cited this specifically as a reason not to comment here.
Shearer wasn't particularly polite either. I'm not going to dig back for examples.
66: I remember LC from my lurking days. I don't remember Shearer.
'I'd like to do something adjacent to what Scott Alexander was doing, and I'd rather not suffer, what should I do differently?"
(I know nothing of SSC/Alexander.)
44 and 55 are of course correct on the "not suffering" part.
On the productive discussion front, such a forum would need to be clear on its ends; the Millian discussion Alexander claims to want is not the same as the rhetorical game LB wanted to play with Shearer, for instance.
A Millian forum would require rules of argument, of acceptable evidence and authorities. Formally that requires at least a rough logic and epistemology*; practically, it requires socialization**, and for that reason I think is by default impossible on the internet.
The evidence suggests a very large minority (even of people with higher education) aren't capable of conducting such an argument in any setting, and the remainder only in very controlled settings. Even this forum is only intermittently capable of such argument, on a few subjects where there is a critical mass of expertise.
*Hence Mill, like AFAIK every major western philosopher, starting with these before he got to his ethics or politics.
**While in theory I can for instance construct a Cartesian chain of evidence from my subjective experience out to books and papers, in practice I'm trusting those sources essentially because my professors taught me to trust the social systems producing the research, and I continue to agree with their judgement.
LC has commented since Shearer went away, but I don't know that he would have otherwise.
Shearer was worthless. Castock was the best, but then he betrayed us by leaving us, so he is also worthless.
I was going to say that Castock was worth more than 20 of Shearer, but the truth is, one Shearer is worth considerably more than 20 Shearers.
LC has commented since Shearer went away, but I don't know that he would have otherwise.
Have I forgotten some particular event that made people think that Castock intended to, or had, left as a result of Shearer's presence? I definitely remember him reasonably expressing a certain amount of upset that Shearer had repeatedly been permitted to guest-post, but as far as I recall there wasn't any moment where Castock said he was leaving because of Shearer, or said he was likely to leave because of Shearer, or was around less and then noticeably more after Shearer wasn't here any more.
This is puzzling me, because Barry and fa both seem to be sure that there was some sense in which Castock was driven away by Shearer's presence, and I really don't remember that happening.
IIRC, Shearer accommodation, already too high, I thought, went over the line when he started submitting front page guest posts, making him look like much more than a just barely tolerated commenter, and LC cited this specifically as a reason not to comment here.
Shit, this makes me the asshole.
73: First prize, a week in Philadelphia. Second prize, two weeks in Philadelphia.
75: Don't you remember that thread? I do, but I'd swear Castock pointed out that the guestposting was gross but didn't say he was leaving over it, and didn't leave over it.
Philly is a nice place to visit. Just don't drive into the city.
77: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_12657.html#1535553
I enjoyed engaging with Shearer. He was smart and in some real sense, honest. It's fascinating to me that people like that -- people with intellectual capacity, real education and a genuine desire to act in good faith -- can wind up getting such shitty results from their brains. I want to understand how that works.
So I had misgivings about him being thrown overboard by Unfogged.
But hey, I recognize that I am like Alexander in this. My attitude springs from a sense of entitlement. I didn't have to take Shearer's bullshit personally. Other folks don't have that luxury.
I mean, I'm quite capable of getting defensive when commenters generalize about my people: old white men. When I find myself in forums where they (we) are ridiculed, the only thing that keeps me from leaving in a huff is that abuse of old white men is generally objectively justified. I don't suppose I'd have much patience for it otherwise.
And to be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't have banned Shearer earlier than we (sorta) did. Just that I'm weirded out by people who seem to remember that we made some choice relating to Shearer that drove Castock off. That could have happened -- Castock was clearly, and reasonably angry about the guest posts -- but as far as I can tell it didn't happen.
I vaguely remember it. I wouldn't have remembered the topic without clicking through.
I'm sure my thinking went that since the content of the guest post was unproblematic, it would be a weird place to start holding Shearer accountable. Ie "We're letting you make questionable contributions to the comment thread, but this innocuous, boring FP is over the line" seemed inconsistent to me.
Ie, we should have either banned him for the racist shit by that point in time, or not worried about the non-racist shit, but the weird middle ground was not something I'm prepared to referee.
The point is that Shearer staying would have meant people leaving, but that didn't happen, since Shearer did go away. LC's 155 in that thread is pretty clear about Shearer being a reason for people of color to stay away from commenting but it's true he doesn't specifically say he would leave over it. If you'd like to focus very narrowly on that, go ahead.
Yeah, I think part of what went weird was that he was super engaged with the site, despite the fact that I think literally everyone disagreed with him about the racist stuff and told him so when he brought it up. It's not as if we had any particular standard for guest-posting other than "You sent in a guest post" but mostly you'd expect guest posts to come from people who were sort of insiders, or close with the FPPosters. And so when guest posts went up (and there were a number of them, right?) I understand the reaction from people who were looking at them that they expressed some kind of endorsement or connection with Shearer as a person, which looked unpleasant given how bad his views were.
85 to 82.
to 84: I didn't mean to be argumentative about anything of substance -- Barry's initial comment threw me because he seemed to remember a different sequence of events than I did.
79: That's a very smart thread, no doubt aided by my absence from it. Seems like there's a good response there to anything anyone might say here. For instance, to heebie's 82, we have
this and this and many other smart comments.
But, of course, one particularly wise commenter retorted with this and this and especially this.
Life is tradeoffs. Shearer's presence here had costs and benefits that are necessarily going to be assessed in good faith differently by different people with different interests.
pf, your conclusions ("Life is tradeoffs. Shearer's presence here had costs and benefits that are necessarily going to be assessed in good faith differently by different people with different interests.") strikes me as inextricable from a privileged position, as if the calculus by poc (or disabled, lbgtq folks) lurkers and commenters as to whether unfogged is a hostile (racist, ableist, anti-lgbtq) community is morally neutral, merely an assessment by "different people with different interests." did you mean something different?
ha. I guess I was aware and defensive at the time. I'm sorry, all. Seems like poor judgement now.
I like that I still made a cock joke (of sorts) while the rest of you were being serious.
As if it isn't bad enough that half the academics I know think Slate Star Codex is genius, now it's linked from Unfogged too? [insert vomit emoji here]
The number one rule of the internet is never read anything by anyone named Scott A that your friends think is smart.
ha. I guess I was aware and defensive at the time. I'm sorry, all. Seems like poor judgement now.
I hadn't remembered commenting in that thread, but looking back I see that I did. I don't think I added much but, at the very end of the thread, I said this which I would stand by (and which is indirectly relevant to the Scott Alexander discussion as well.
[O]ne of the lessons I take from 442.last is that a certain amount of explicitly acknowledged arbitrariness in terms of rules and enforcement can be a good thing -- because the strain created within the community by things being occasionally unfair and/or inconsistent is less than the strain that would be required to come to a collective agreement on what "fair" would mean.
I realize that puts more pressure on the FPPs (who, obviously, do a lot already), because it asks them to be willing to take action without requiring a clear consensus, but I also don't see a practical alternative to occasionally just deferring to the judgement of benevolent overlords.
Which, in this context, is just to say, that I'm inclined to cut the FPP quite a bit of slack.
now it's linked from Unfogged too? [insert vomit emoji here]
Yeah, that may not have been a good idea. For what it's worth, the discussion here has been interesting and helpful to me, but perhaps not for anyone else.
For what it's worth, in addition to the metafilter links above, I found this comment seems like a useful perspective
The thread being mourned was continually full of really shockingly horrible stuff. Straight faced technobabble laden arguments for genocide and such. A reliable go-to for "oh-shit,-humanity-is-screwed" porn.
It was impossible to tell how much of it was actually awful people earnestly advancing awful ideas vs screwed up performance art with people intentionally posting the worst stuff they could think of just for shock value or to mock the fact that participants there responded so embarrassingly to so much of it. ... but I don't think that is a defense of it at all, it's an indictment.
I had previously believed (and people who knew Scott personally lead me to believe...) that the thread was created as a tarpit for trolls and people with absurdly repugnant views to waste each others time in a place where other people could ignore it-- rather than these discussions invading every other thread and making them useless to the majority of people who want nothing to do with that stuff-- who feel they morally can't just sit and pretend its okay to advance horrible policies but also don't want to waste their lives rehashing ethical arguments that most people considered settled a century ago. The "designated crap thread" approach is sometimes more effective than punting the sources outright (and also less harmful to false positives)...
This post strongly indicates otherwise and is causing me a vertigo inducing shift in how I perceive the author and his community.
I couldn't be more disappointed. And I'm only left hoping that the support of that toxicity expressed in Scott's post is an emotional retaliation to the despicable harassment he reported experiencing ... rather than an earnest position.
i'm just boggled by the contrast between earnest empathetic struggles with this SA person's reactions to being hassled, doxx'd whatever vs. the really dogged reluctance to listen to what the poc and their allies were saying on the linked-to unfogged thread. x trapnel was giving out good advice folks!
i'm just boggled by the contrast between earnest empathetic struggles with this SA person's reactions to being hassled, doxx'd whatever vs. the really dogged reluctance to listen to what the poc and their allies were saying on the linked-to unfogged thread.
Are you talking to me specifically?
I don't feel like many other people are expressing empathetic struggles with SA (for example pf said this about him, "Nobody has used the word 'entitled' in this thread yet, but I take that to be the heart of Alexander's offense."). I didn't comment much on the linked thread and I don't know that I helped at all, but I very much care about what poc and their allies say (and, for what it's worth, endorsed x trapnel's comments).
pf, your conclusion ... strikes me as inextricable from a privileged position
Absolutely. I tried to be clear on that in comments leading up to this one. See 55 and 80. And the conclusion that you draw from that -- that I see a certain amount of moral neutrality in this -- is also correct.
In our fallen world, I'm okay with the fact that there are places frequented by decent people online where racism can be confronted, dissected and mocked -- even as I understand that the desire to do so is much more available to a person of my privilege. Having racism shoved in my face is unpleasant, but a tradeoff that I'm sometimes willing to make. Still, I wouldn't dream of suggesting there is some moral valence to somebody else's unwillingness to engage with someone like Shearer.
The man thinks people were in a bubble b/c they thought a place that he says was 44% libertarian, altright and neoreactionary and 17% social democratic was heavily rightwing. I think we can assume his own politics were less than great.
The part where he says newspapers had to shut down comments because "any fair moderation" must allow for nambla types is pretty funny.
79 That's how I remembered it more or less. I didn't exactly comport myself the way I should have, I generally didn't engage with Shearer and I called him a racist pos plenty of other times but I should have backed LC and hard in that thread and my only comment was completely irrelevant. Not good.
99: I remember you were reluctant to ban bob as well, which I interpreted as lack of vindictiveness on your part. Even if you regret some of your actions, I think the instinct in itself is laudable.
100 Bob was a troll and extremely destructive to the comity of this place that we all value highly who I mistakenly thought was redeemable, Shearer was an outright racist pos and I definitely would have supported his banning at the time. I remembered being reluctant to comment on threads he was engaged with and it slowed down my engagement with the blog when I began to comment though I'd read it for years.
Belief in redemprion also is laudable.
Huh, I had forgotten that thread. But I stand by everything I said. Including the grouching about MS Word.
SSC has always seemed to me to operate from a position of really classic ressentiment, with all the bad faith/envy/projection stuff that implies. He seems to position himself as this rational, nice, decent person who is inexplicably beleaguered by mean feminists and PC thugs and people who let their feelings drive their arguments who are all unfairly and stupidly but very powerfully and successfully out to get him, and it's always with this sort of metaphorical sob in his throat, this sort of "see that you made me do" quality that I find extremely off-putting. Sort of a "I'm so nice and smart, it's just so sad that all these mean inferior people's mean inferior ideas have so much traction when everyone could be listening to me instead" - rhetorical nice-guyism.
I find it fatiguing and am surprised that he has sustained it for so long. Maybe he's in grad school; grad school is always a seething cauldron of ressentiment.
It's a wonder I'm so emotionally well adjusted.
It's a jungle out there, sometimes it makes me wonder
how I keep myself so slender.
104: All I know about him is from reading the MetaFilter thread and links, but I think he's a doctor.
Slate Star Codex is the classic naive egghead on the spectrum. He's the one person in a thousand who truly enjoys debate and is open to having his mind changed. You'd think he would realize that everyone else either A) does not want to debate under any circumstances because they are conflict-averse or lack confidence, or B) takes debate as an opportunity to use rhetorical tricks and bullying to "defeat" people in category A. But the experience of having a big online following (commenters on his website and associated discussion sites), and getting a lot of respect for his own writing from reputable people (these reputable people are not part of his following) makes it very hard to resist the idea that he can help people by getting them to debate.
I think SA is an MD and a practicing psychiatrist, but I'm not certain.
110: I don't habitually read him, so I'm generalizing about guys like that generally. But there's something odd about how people presenting as the 'naive egghead on the spectrum' in that manner seem to to end up feeling that neo-Nazis, while you wouldn't agree with them generally, are important to listen to, while leftists are just too cruel and hurtful to engage with.
That sounds like I'm being sarcastic about SSC particularly, and I haven't paid enough attention to him to be confident about that. But I don't get anyone who interacts with a spectrum from hard left to hard right and comes out believing that the mean people are reliably on the left.
Maybe somebody sounds see if he'll have a nice discussion on the Nation of Islam's views of white people. It's based on science, I hear.
Neo-Nazis are grateful to him personally for providing a forum where they won't be banned. 100% of people in 21st-century United States who claim to prioritize Free Speech above all else are right-wingers. Leftists aren't as worried about being banned. They are worried about being bullied by a mob.
Nazis and their "33 Words."
Rolling Rock - From the glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe, we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from the mountain springs to you.
i'm just boggled by the contrast between earnest empathetic struggles with this SA person's reactions to being hassled, doxx'd whatever vs. the really dogged reluctance to listen to what the poc and their allies were saying on the linked-to unfogged thread. x trapnel was giving out good advice folks!
Wow, I really was! And I used to be so much more eloquent, too! What happened? Oh, right: I stopped writing, or even having serious conversations in English. Eep.
It comes from the mountain springs to you.
It's water.
I always enjoyed the Culture War threads, so it's nothing unusual that I just spent an hour reading from last week's Culture War quality contribution roundup. I think it shows that there's so much neutral discussion on the site that judging it as just right-wing and worthy of death is wrong. One guy posting one link to the 14 words is a drop in the ocean.
There's no defense of tolerating white supremacy I can make that hasn't already been shown to be based in privilege or racism upthread, but I still think it's important to tolerate it anyway. I'm just saying that's a fact about me -- that politically I agree with liberals 100% about structural racism, reality-based policy-making, mental health care, professionalism, while the Republicans don't have anything going for them at all, but I still stopped voting for Democrats in 2016 because Republicans will let people say what they think.
As long as they toe the line:
none of the Republican members of the committee showed any serious interest in developing the factual record about the president's conduct: not on matters related to L'Affaire Russe, not on payments to paramours, not on other corruption matters. They showed up, rather, as fixers--very much as Cohen himself would only recently have done. They were there merely to discredit the witness.
The water from those springs does taste better than most municipal water, unless there's mine run off or a hunting cabin owned by a family with lots of diarrhea in it.
119: to quote myself: "It's not just that he has unusual and (to some) offensive opinions; those opinions seem so central to his personality that he is simply incapable of shutting up about them, whatever the social pressure on him to do so.
It seems that it is really important to him to be allowed to say very rude things about Israel, Zionists, etc. That's not how sane people think."
119.2 is garbage. I wasn't aware Democrats didn't let people say what they think. They just call you racist if you say something racist. There are often very bad consequences if you are found to be a racist because it turns out that people from the races targeted by racism really don't like it and aren't willing to have a debate as to whether or not they are inferior. There is no way to avoid this without taking political power from non-white people.
112: Generalizing from the other Scott, I think the key thing that leads to this is failing to process pain from 15-25 resulting in still seeing the world through a nerds vs non-nerds lens that overrides everything else. It really is true right now that the left, and especially the feminist left, are more likely to criticize nerd culture. Usually that's valid criticism of toxic aspects of nerd culture, but the more sarcastic/flippant parts of that can also veer into being mean to nerds in a way that can bring back painful emotions for these people.
And the thing about Nazis is they're not specifically aimed at nerds, and so don't cause the same emotional reaction in these people.
For those who didn't read the original thread, I think it's worth pointing out that what brought a wave of criticism down on the other Scott wasn't some sort of generalized "nerd culture" but his specific wistful post about how the world was better for nerds like him back in the days when a woman could be forced to marry a man against her will.
Am I correct in summarizing 119 as saying you're a 1-issue voter and that issue is being in a political coalition that includes white supremacists?
Liberals talk a good game about free speech, but then say they prefer speech that is true and humane. Republicans know that white people should not suffer under those constraints.
Noumenon72 gets it:
I agree with liberals 100% about structural racism, reality-based policy-making, mental health care, professionalism, while the Republicans don't have anything going for them at all, but I still stopped voting for Democrats in 2016 because Republicans will let people say what they think.
And the thing about Nazis is they're not specifically aimed at nerds, and so don't cause the same emotional reaction in these people.
See, this is yet another problem with just portraying the Nazis as a sort of huge stereotyped wall of relentless evil. The Nazis hated nerds. It is more accurate than not to say that the entire Second World War was one enormous contest of meathead sports fanatics vs. pasty nerds, and the nerds won. The Nazis had huge mass gymnastics events and relentless propaganda about how sporty muscular guys were the best and deserved all the good things in life. The allies had asthmatic socially awkward gay men building computers in sheds and eccentric chubby Jewish guys staying up all night arguing about physics and putting on satirical ballets that they'd written themselves (Le Sacre du Mesa, look it up, it's in Rhodes).
On checking, the ballet was in fact not written by a chubby Jewish guy. It was written by a very tall thin bearded mathematician called Donald "Moll" Flanders, set to music by Gershwin.
Am I correct in summarizing 119 as saying you're a 1-issue voter and that issue is being in a political coalition that includes white supremacists?
Not just including them, but letting them speak out about white supremacy without criticism.
126 is not a charitible or complete summary, though it is roughly true. But at any rate 125 wasn't meant to be a defense, it's supposed to be a criticism. The point I'm trying to make is that what's happening in 112 is based on what things are emotional triggers for them. (Which is ironic since said people are often so anti safe space and unable to see that what they're asking for is a safe space only for their trauma.)
It may not be charitable, but since I know a lot of people who know him personally who circulate a version of the story like "he's a liberal and a feminist and this online mob harassed him just for being an awkward nerdy guy" I thought it was worth providing the context as I saw it. Of course I agree with your broader point, especially about how readily the people who whine about "safe spaces" for people they don't like start looking for safe spaces of their own.
I finally read the link in the original post, and it reminds me of nothing so much as the joke about Joe the Pigfucker.
Shorter Scott Alexander: "but you give a forum to one pedophile ..."
I think the first half of that story has a lot of truth to it, namely I think in most ways his heart is in the right place and that in his working life he's much better for women around him than the vast majority of people in his field. The problem is in the second half of the story, which downplays how problematic what he said really was and his failure to really come to grips with that. That said, the main problem here was him using non-anonymous public comment sections for a conversation that should have been had in private with a therapist. I do think his thoughts as expressed in that comment thread were complicated enough that a private compassionate conversation would likely have resulted in him coming to a better understanding both of his trauma and of why some of his ways of thinking about it were problematic, and this conversation happening in public on twitter and subreddits was unfortunate. And I do think that among the majority of valid criticism, there's a minority that was mean-spirited and I can see why it was emotionally difficult for him. That said, he continues to be in the wrong, and I'm sad about that because unlike the Scott from this post I think he's genuinely interesting. And of course most of his "supporters" are much worse in every way than he is.
I'm highly resistant to interpreting any of this as a therapeutic question*. While any one person my have been led into the beliefs they hold via events causing some treatable condition, the public problem isn't the medical condition, it's the political position. Considering the two as one involves defining certain beliefs as pathological. That obviously is slippery slope, but worse than that I think is empirically false, carrying an implicit assumption that a well-adjusted post-therapy person is necessarily progressive, which on the face of it I find absurd.
*In general; again, I know nothing of Alexander.
Aw, I was coming in to disagree with 119, and now a bunch of people have been much harsher than I would have been. But from a slightly different angle:
I think it shows that there's so much neutral discussion on the site that judging it as just right-wing and worthy of death is wrong.
The fact that your reaction to what happened with the CW thread is to talk about whether it was "worthy of death" is kind of the same thing that made me roll my eyes at Alexander. The fact that some jerk called Alexander's job and tried to get him fired is awful, although Alexander doesn't say that he knows who did it or why, and he certainly seems to have been harassed by people on the right as well. But the complaints about criticism? Look, having people think that you're soft on racists isn't the same thing as being killed. Having people tell other people that you're soft on racists isn't the same thing as being killed. It's not even the same as being silenced.
When you're thinking about the value of free speech and the interchange of ideas, I think it's important to remember that the idea that, e.g., mainstream science does not support the idea that there are important innate behavioral differences between 'races' as we socially perceive them, and that therefore people who reach for fringy science to support that idea seem to be engaging in motivated reasoning because they want there to be a scientific basis for racism, is also an 'uncomfortable', 'controversial' idea, and if you can't handle hearing it you're not all that interested in free speech.
137.1 Not nearly as harsh a I was prepared to be though I decided to withhold comment, at least until I'm drunk. I did appreciate Moby's comment.
I'm grumpy because I'm really sick. Flu-sick.
136: I was talking about Scott non-Alexander, and I really do think it's impossible to discuss his situation without an anxiety disorder being a key part of the picture.
126,133,135: Are we mixing up the Scott's? It sounds like you're talking about the computer scientist Scott.
I mean, as noted upthread, I personally am soft on racists, in the sense that I like having people who are both wrong and argumentative around to argue with -- the Shearer era here was largely my fault. But I can hear people saying that my attitude in that regard can be a real problem without going into a decline over it or thinking that I've been killed or threatened with death.
141: I didn't realize that there were 2 Scotts!
My plan now is to just forget about all this.
I didn't realize that there were 2 Scotts!
In the world, or just currently being discussed in this thread?
141: no, we are not mixing them up; yes, we are talking about the one you mean. Upetgi referred to him as "the other Scott" and I followed suit. Of course, they seem to have a strong affinity for each other.
144: My religion makes a large fuss about there only being one Scott.
Regarding computer scientist Scott and his infamous comment; sure he was foolish to treat the comment section of his fairly obscure and low traffic blog as a private space, but it was foolish mainly because clickbait journalists are assholes. I think the people who went out of their way to signal boost the comment for a story were the bigger villains in that affair.
I no longer have any idea which Scott anyone is talking about, but I find the name aesthetically displeasing so I'm happy to slander all of them. Anyway, I stand by 136, emphasizing the ff.
Essear and I were talking about CS ScottA, but I thought 136 misunderstood us as talking about Psych ScottA's. The ScottA's think they're in the same boat, I disagree because I think hosting Nazis and defending them is worse than saying something problematic deep in a comment thread in the context of discussing why you had suicidal thoughts and feelings of gender dysphoria as a teenager.
Yeah, to the extent I recall the CS ScottA thing, while what he said was not a good a thing to have said, I would buy that it might be understandable/forgivable if you knew him. But the wave of defenders he got insisting that there was nothing wrong with it were kind of terrible. (I could have sworn we talked about it here, but I can't find it.)
I have no idea who these Scott's are.
Nor what the invisible things they possess are.
My religion makes a large fuss about there only being one Scott.
Nonsense. Everyone knows there are no true Scotts.
As for SSC Scott, as I said early in the thread, he probably had noble (if unrealistic) motives initially in trying to create some ideal space for discussion, but once it was clear that the space had basically become a clubhouse for fringe racist weirdos to hang out and push their favorite theories, he should have either closed it down or dissociated himself from it. Tending a poisonous garden like that isn't a neutral act.
More generally, I'm always a little bit depressed by these sorts of discussions about speech vs criticism vs online harrassment & etc., because the emerging consensus always seems to be "Well, if you want to say things in public (that is, on the internet) then you should just grow a thicker skin". What depresses me is that I think of "thick skinned" as adjacent to "jerk".
I don't think a public sphere full of PZ M/ye/rs clones is in outcome we should be selecting for.
There is one Scott, and his name is Adams.
More generally, I'm always a little bit depressed by these sorts of discussions about speech vs criticism vs online harrassment & etc., because the emerging consensus always seems to be "Well, if you want to say things in public (that is, on the internet) then you should just grow a thicker skin".
I think it's a little less grim than that. I'm calling Alexander fragile because he's being fragile while insisting that the absolutely free open exchange of ideas is so vital that chilling the expression of white supremacists wrecks it. If that's what you're committed to -- "snowflakes" can't have "safe spaces" where they're protected from things like racism and homophobia because completely unfettered free speech is paramount -- then complaining about your own hurt feelings makes you a hypocrite with no self-awareness.
Once you start admitting that there are some things that are going to destroy a decent conversation if you let people say them without consequence, then we can talk about protecting people's feelings, including Alexander's.
Scott Adams: Dilbert creator, Trump supporter, has a fandom with a lot of engineers and other kinds of nerds. Uses his real name as far as I know.
Scott Alexander: blogger at Slate Star Codex and related communities, assures us he's personally liberal but has weird ideas about tolerance for white supremacy and other right-wing extremism. Uses a pseudonym.
Did I miss anyone? If so, can I get a link? I Googled "computer science scott controversial" and a few similar things but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant.
We won't have the Scotts properly sorted out until we know which ones put sugar on their porridge.
Scott Aaronson: CS professor specializing in complexity theory and grumbling about quantum computing, with the occasional surprise dip into personal whining. Blogs; is aware of, interacts with, and is somewhat sympathetic to SSC ScottA, so it's not surprising that it's hard to remember both of them.
138, 119 ok I'm drunk now. Fuck right off.
Scott Aaronson has just blogged about how he used to obsessively read criticisms of himself on a sub-reddit (an activity that was clearly not good for his mental health). In the comments there are a couple of interesting accounts of the SSC sub-reddit from people who took part:
Please, please somebody listen: the Culture War threads really were pretty bad. Scott Alexander is wrong - very wrong - when he says they were ideologically balanced. He, by his own admission, barely ever visited those threads! I've participated in those threads for over 2 years before becoming so bitter, so disillusioned, losing so much hope for the ideal of rational debate convincing people fairly, that I've started reading sneerclub as a cathartic break from the people I find in the culture war threads - the people who sound so calm and rational, who solemnly nod along to how online feminism is at times excessive, and then turn around and conclude "also ethnostates are a good idea and blacks are genetically inferior".and
My experience of the Culture War threads was largely the same as sad anons. It was an experience of being ground down by people who brought the same arguments to the table every week, citing the same studies, having all the same conversations about methodology and data, all while knowing that their viewpoint was one which advocated an ethnostate. Calling them out was forbidden, and could result in a ban. It was a form of the same epistemic masochism that you're talking about, and while I never did change my mind about whether or not blacks were inferior, I did grow to hate going there and having to either get embroiled in another debate on the topic, or let those comments go by without saying anything. The distributions of upvotes and downvotes, which are hard not to read as a proxy for community support, did little to help any of that. So I left.
In retrospect one has to admire alt.fan.warlord for just zipping past all the tiresome and wordy intermediate states and arriving at the inevitable endpoint of online discussion.
119.2 Jesus, do you know any Republicans?
Scott Aaronson has just blogged about how he used to obsessively read criticisms of himself on a sub-reddit (an activity that was clearly not good for his mental health). In the comments there are a couple of interesting accounts of the SSC sub-reddit from people who took part:
I am amused that somebody in that thread says that they stopped reading CrookedTimber because the comments were terrible. A reasonable decision but the juxtuposition is sort of unflattering.
Are you still drunk, Barry? I don't know when/if you'll get to see A Bread Factory, but there's hard to imagine anything more up my alley. It's the treat I gave myself over my birthday weekend and I was delighted and inspired, all the more by the director's comments.
166 is hilarious.
167 Stone cold sober but down with something that I hope isn't bronchitis. I've heard great things about A Bread Factory and I really want to see it. Did you see it with the intro and Q&A with Matt Z/oller Se/itz and Patrick Wang? MZS has moved out to Ohio now and is going to be organizing more screenings like that.
168: yeah, that one. An old professor of mine was driving some students down to watch and let me know about it. My newish girlfriend is the right audience for the Euripides, so she came along too and got some credit for being the only student from her department who showed. I got to ask the last question, basically (though I didn't say this out loud because it's trite) whether it's A Bread Factory for the films when it's The Bread Factory in the films because pieces of the story are relevant in so many places. I have a lot of experience speaking up against gentrification and for school funding at various board meetings now and it was useful for me to be reminded that I need art and creation as well as that sort of political work. It's not bread and roses but whatever it is it's important.
After catching up on this thread, I just spent a couple of hours aimlessly reading about the two Scotts and the Culture War thread. I regret every second.